Well, this should be another one of those posts that people either walk away from thinking, walk away from wondering what I'm on about, or just plain wonder what I'm on... I assure you, I've been thinking about this a great deal recently, and I'm simply speaking what I perceive to be the truth. This may or may not reflect the actual truth.
Equality is a lie.
That was simple enough to say. I wish more people would say it, or at least more would actually realise it.
One of the biggest disservices we've done the last few generations here in the U.S. is to promote a view that equality is real, inherent, and that diversity is actually to be embraced. For my money, we've done nothing but lie to the last several generations, and set any real attempts at world peace back about thirty years.
Let's start with the premise that all men are created equal. Bzzzt. Wrong. Already running into problems, and we haven't even gotten past the first premise. Not a good sign.
There are few of us that will ever be an Einstein, Mozart, Baryshnikov, Twain, Bach, Shakespeare (although I disagree with most opinions of his greatness), Gandhi, etc. Those are levels of excellence that few will ever achieve through hard work, and fewer still through innate ability. On the other end of the spectrum, a relatively low percentage of us will ever be at the level of the lowest possible level, uwilling to take pride in our accomplishments, or even unwilling to take care of our loved ones or ourselves.
Okay, what about...all men are created with equal potential. Bzzzzt! Wrong again! Not doing so well, are we?
No amount of hard work will transform my musical skill into that of Bach, Mozart, or my personal keyboard demigods, Nick Rhodes and Richard Wright. I could practise for years, and I'd still never come close. Same thing applies to my writing; I could practise the craft for decades and still never come close to the talent and success of most of the truly creative and talented literary giants. It's not a matter of being unwilling to practise or put in the effort, it's a basic fact that I do not have the requisite skill.
Nature is a series of bell curves, with spikes of statistical anomalies. One need only look at the animal kingdom to see the food chain in action. There is a natural pecking order. There are those on top, and there are those on the bottom. Likewise, if you look at, say...physics, there is -almost- no way that an asteroid is going to win a gravitational battle with a goodish sized planet. There are freaks of nature. It's possible for a much smaller charged, incandescent astonomical body to generate enough charge to disregard gravity by means of electrical fluid mechanics, but that's a relatively rare occurrance. By and large, objects and creatures alike obey the law of averages, subject to statistical anomalies.
Einstein would be a statistical anomaly. The statistical anomalies are the ones on the low ends at either side of the bell curve of success and greatness. No amount of study and dedication is going to give one that kind of talent and insight. No amount of wishing will make it so. As with the animal kingdom's pecking order from top to bottom, we as people have a natural pecking order of greatness and success. From that greatness and success come accolates like additional respect, admiration, etc. In the middle, the huge hump of the bell curve are the majority of the masses--your average people, with varying statistical deviations of success or failure sloping up and down on either side, towards the extremes. As with anything else, we are subject to the law of averages.
"But we're human beings! We're better than that!"
No, no we're not.
The big problem with human beings is that we're dishonest. Nobody wants to look themselves in the mirror in the morning and say, "You know, I kinda suck at what I do." No, we all want to believe we're better than that.
What has happened over history has been a constant refusal of people to acknowledge their existence is constrained within certain potentials. Not all of those potentials are equal. People saw these differences in potential a lot more clearly in times before it was politically correct to be blind to the differences. Those differences led to discrimination and other things that people didn't really like. They found it impossible to conform to a system that required them to be part of a subset of humanity in order to get what they wanted, whether that was jobs, special treatment, normal treatment, what-have-you.
Since efforts to themselves conform to what society required of them in order to achieve their goals, they started a subculture. This subculture holds that, since getting individuals to conform is really not desirable (nor, I might observe, is it even entirely possible across the board), we should change the system. They hold that we should buck the natural law of averages and force society to conform to fit the bell curve. It's like trying to fit a rock inside a postage envelope. You can do it, but the envelope really isn't designed for it. What you end up with is an envelope that looks like it has a rock in it--a misshapen "flat" plane, with a giant bump in its surfaces. People have done this to society, and called it "equality". The envelope represents the norm, and they're shoving people into it that don't belong They hold that, since everyone is now inside the envelope, they're equal.
Unfortunately, this gets to be a bit like "thinking outside the box". Decades ago, a trend started whereby great progress was recognised as coming from people who took unorthodox routes to achieve solutions to problems. Others couldn't do the same thing, not being able to think in non-linear, non-conformist ways. They called this thinking outside the box. Since the results were so good, it became quite trendy to either actually think outside the box, or at least pretend you could. The problem with that approach to success is that, as you get more and more people thinking outside the box, it becomes the new norm. The box expands to encompass all the people that jump on the bandwagon to think outside the box. Therefore, to truly think outside the box, you require resizing of the box on a regular basis--you keep needing a bigger box.
The "envelope" methodology of conforming society's view of "equal" to all people has the same issues. Every time a new definition of equal is reached, we have a misshapen envelope. And that works, for a while. It worked with feminism. That was good for a while. The new norm was accepting women in a different role in society. The next thing they wanted to stuff in the envelope was race. That's been done, and was good for a while. We've got a markedly more sizeable envelope at this point. The current trend is in favour of allowing gays into the envelope of equality.
You know, at some point, people are going to have to sit down and realise that the envelope cannot be extended indefinitely. At some point, you have to sit down and stop lying to yourselves.
Expanding the definition won't work forever. It is not the road to peace. We have several generations of people which have been brought up to believe in this huge envelope of expanded equality. They've been lied to. We're not all equal. We don't all have inherent equal potential. So what happens when they fail in life?
We lie to them again, apparently. We remove grades from our educational system, because it's too traumatic to their little bleeding hearts to realise that they don't measure up equally against their peers. We remove competitive sports from the schools for the same reasons. We remove anything that would actually indicate the reality that we are not all equal.
And we do them a huge disservice in the process. Why? Because underneath that veneer of extra politically correct sensitivity training and conditioning, they still don't have what it takes to truly measure up equally in life. Some will get jobs and others will not. Some will wash out and some will soar. And what happens to those who can't get the good jobs, the high pay, and even wash out? They breed a deep-down loathing and resentment of those who succeed. They are wholly unprepared for the eventuality that indicates to them that they are not equal to their peers. They find this truth out firsthand, and the envelope rips. The illusion can no longer hold. Without the illusion in place, those are the lower rungs are not simply disenchanted, they're bitter, resentful, angry, hateful people.
And what do we do to help them? We tell them, "It's okay. We're all equal. It doesn't matter that you don't measure up, because we're all the same." In other words, we lie to them again, and try to put them back in the envelope, claiming that the system failed them.
The system failed them, alright. Just not in the way that's conventionally meant.
What would do society far more good, far faster, is simply admitting the truth. There will always be a caste system. There will always be inequality. There will always be the haves and the have nots, so long as society is based on measuring people.
And that gets to the heart of it. We measure people from birth to death. When you're born, what's the first thing a mother announces? Your height and weight at birth. You're catalogued from birth to death, from your measurements straight out of your mother's womb, to what the epitaph and funeral attendance rate says as a reflection of how you lived your life, when you die.
Instead of lying to people about embracing diversity (which is nothing more than the act of creating the envelope) being a Good Thing[tm], and about how equal they are to others, we should expend the effort on something that would actually help the situation.
Change society not to give the illusion of equality, but to actually generate it. The way to do that is not to generate a false sense of equality. The way to do that is very simple: you only have to acknowledge one simple truth:
The only way in which we are equal is that we are all unequal.
That's it. The sooner that masses raalise that, and stop trying to live a lie that has been spiralling out of control for decades, the sooner they can deal with reality. One might not be happy with reality, but you don't grow resentful, hateful, and violent towards it. If something performs "as intended", nobody's in for a rude awakening--there was truth in advertising, and it is what it is. People will accept that. If you lie to them, tell them it's something it isn't, and they find out the truth, they grow disillusioned, hostile, hateful, and even violent.
The truth doesn't care about "equality" or "diversity". The truth doesn't actually care about anything. The truth simply is. And it is the truth, however unpopular, that all men and women are not created equal.
I firmly believe in the truth. I believe in peace. I believe in the acknowledgement of truth as being the road to peace.
Is this to say that people need "accept their lot" in life, that they should simply suffer a lesser existence than others and never try to better themselves? Absolutely not. We should all be working to better ourselves every day. But we all have our limits. Lying to ourselves and pretending we are unlimited creatures, when in fact we do have our limitations, is setting ourselves up for failure, anger, resentment, and further injustices perpetuated in the name of the hatred that is borne of being told that we can have anything if we work hard enough, when we most certainly cannot. That little white lie has caused more strife and interpersonal/intergroup tension and bloodshed over the years than I care to think about.
Work to better yourself to the best of your limits. Realise that you have limits to your personal growth, but always try to max yourself out even if you think you've hit them. Concede that you are not equal to everyone else, and that at some point, you will inevitably not measure up as well as you'd like to think you will.
The sooner we stop lying to ourselves, and to our younger generations, the sooner we will stop breeding the resentment and anger that drive so much of the conflict in the world.
All we have to do is be honest with ourselves, and teach others to do the same. That's the very first step towards washing away a lot of society's problems: a steady stream of truth.
We are not above nature's laws, which include the law of averages. Stop buying into the lie, and you start to realise that the injustices visited upon you aren't as bad as you think they are. Life is inherently unfair to some, and more than fair to others. The injustices don't seem so unjust when you realise that it's simply the natural order of things to follow the law of averages, and that it's not personal, not hateful, and not evil. Stripped of intent, the law of averages simply is. It need be nothing more than that.
When people worldwide recognise this, not only will they set themselves free, they will set their brothers and sisters free. They will realise that they may be blessed with a lot, but that it was only by a quirk of fate, and the grace of falling inside a subset of the bell curve. If not for that luck, they could be just as unfortunate as those who are not so fortunate. With that knowledge in mind, and with a dose of rationality and civility, people would not make it personal, and not visit disdain upon their fellow travellers in life. When it comes down to it, the road to peace is the realisation that, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."
But to raelise that, one must first cast off the shroud of lies that has been thrust upon us by a sick society trying to mend itself in one of the most outrageously failure-prone fashions ever witnessed.
All of this is, of course, my opinion. But I do believe it, or I wouldn't say it. I urge everyone to think about it a little--or a lot.
